The phones, the long-distance phones are ringing. The satellite phone from the field camp in Kosovo. The lawyer’s phone in a complex in Palo Alto. The car phone conveying a child to baseball practice. In this way the siblings converse and condole much as the now-vanished Carolina parakeets with their sunflower-yellow heads and radiant green…
Cosmologists, epic poets, holy men in exile— They all found their way to the illustrious library. All lovers of knowledge were welcome to a niche In that bristling hush, no matter how shaggy or ragged. There were the usual cynics and the inevitable stoics. Some were sages without honor, scrawling out summas In their mongrel…
Little Kaiser, the parrot in our local headshop’s sidewalk cage, confronts an unceasing daily stream of whistles and coos and hellos, waspish buzz of film on auto-wind, the sudden, minor lightning of a flash. He doesn’t seem to mind. Not a headshop exactly: years ago the police swept away the ranks of bongs and rolling…
When you stood up and walked past the rows of desks and windows, seeing the yellow and green trees you had already admired, praising even the door where you stood before entering, imagining yourself reading passages of sin or love or the earth or moon’s ashen birth— what amazement you must have felt later, looking…
What had been hovering in the air all evening, there, as near as the other side of the table— No, not a woman, but so like a woman, turning away and smiling privately. More like a man—a group of men— who have found a way to draw the party to them. Meanwhile I sit combing…
An absolute sound, this soughing above the tops of trees. For the longest while I couldn’t look up, so much did I long to see the ocean, rough and whitened. Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always,…
Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day which is not my birthday but will do until the eleventh of June comes around and I know what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat with a tan hatband, a walk in the park and to share a shower with a zaftig beauty who lost her Bronx…
All bend in one wind.
—Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland, June 2000 Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant. Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain. We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace, room full of poets’ books leaning rumpled, half-asleep. All…
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